I came across a fun little program (free!) for those of you who want to make simple sculpties without learning Blender or any other 3D software. I'm talking about PloppSL. Creating sculpties was never so easy before.

Basically you have a canvas, where you draw your object (in 2D, just like you did as a kid). Then you flip it, and paint the other side (or just use the same picture for both sides). And then you "inflate" it. Sounds weird, so I'm actually going to make a sculptie and show you what I'm talking about.

Let's say we want to create a sculptie heart. This is what we would draw:

I actually didn't draw it in the program itself. With Plopp you can import pictures (draw them in Photoshop for example) and that's what I did. The program then "inflates" the picture into 3D:

Now you can save the sculptie shape and the texture and upload those into Second Life. The shape you get is not perfect, but these sculpties are great to use as seasonal decorations (hearts, pumpkins, Christmas stars). Here I made Mary Poppins style ballon flight helper:

The good news is, according to the website, that the program will be developed in the near future, and this includes better conversion to sculpties, adding sculptie preview and support for sculpties with holes. Neat!

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About Me

I'm a girl from Poland, enjoying Second Life and exploring its potential for entertainment, education, business, arts and science. I like to push the limits and see how much I can achieve by mixing creative ideas with Second Life possibilities. I own a shop in-world, Magic Nook, where you can buy clothes, accessories and a variety of items to make your Second Life more fun. I sometimes work for RL companies as a digital content creator in SL. I was a contributing journalist for SL'ang Life magazine for 6 months. In January 2008 I defended my master thesis about business opportunities SL offer to RL companies :)